In Young Boys, Marlene Dumas’s line-up of ghostly lads is stark and oppressed against the ominous background, trailing off in the distance into mere sketchy traces of suggestion. It’s this suggestion that Dumas does best: a void of colour, a bleeding line, she creates a subtle, unnerving, perversity from an unabashed simplicity. This is painting with no frills: full on, with nowhere to hide…

South African born artist Marlene Dumas has been called one of the hottest names in contemporary art. Working in a style that has been called neo-expressionist and conceptualist, Dumas creates lush, often disturbing and unnerving images of racial, sexual, and cultural subjectivity…

“I write about art because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities? I don’t like being paternalised and colonised by every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along (male or female).”

Let’s be clear; its not about the color of the skin. Even if I have to admit I have never seen in the history of painting such a wide palette of colors for the surface of the naked human body as I have seen in the paintings of Marlene Dumas. Titian, Rubens, Delacroix, they all showed that the color of the skin in painting can take a full range of blues, reds and greens. But such wonderful, washed out, transparent colors of dark red-brown, deep purpleblue and variations of charcoal on a living body, and such frightful tones of whitish green and bluish mist on a dead body or face, make Marlene Dumas an exceptional painter.

Speaking at the opening of her first exhibition of new works in New York in almost a decade and her first solo show here since a 2008 retrospective at MoMA, Marlene Dumas stood in front of an ebullient self-portrait, the only recognizable trace of her former self in the series of new paintings. “I always zoom in on the human body and the human face,” she explained, referring to her previous work, “but here I wanted to tackle space.